


Song for St. Cecilia

by yunitsa



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Dark, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-24
Updated: 2006-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:30:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunitsa/pseuds/yunitsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Someday, they will find Earth. They haven't yet.</i> Speculation written after "Epiphanies" (season 2).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Song for St. Cecilia

_O dear white children casual as birds,  
Playing among the ruined languages,  
So small beside their large confusing words,  
So gay against the greater silences  
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,  
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,  
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain  
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,  
Weep for the lives your wishes never led._

~ ~ ~

Someday, they will find Earth. They haven't yet.

~ ~ ~

Kara Thrace and Lee Adama are drinking, down at the bottom of a bottle of moonshine that's swallowed them whole.

They hadn't meant to end up like this. At the beginning there had been a bunch of other pilots with them, Starbuck is sure. They'd been playing cards. She might have punched someone. Or, no -- came close but Lee had restrained her, a heavy arm across her chest, and she'd been so infuriated that she'd poured herself a whole glass of the vile clear stuff from the still.

And now here they are alone, at a table sticky and rank with cheap booze, cards scattered around them as though they'd rained from the sky.

"There's no sky," Starbuck says, or tries to say. "No sky here. We're outta job."

"You are…so drunk," Lee says, as though he's any better himself.

"Pot, meet kettle," Starbuck tells him, forcing herself lucid through sheer competition. "Better watch yourself, _Major_, or you'll end up like old Tigh."

"Give us another, Ellen!" Lee crows, and it's really a terrible imitation and not funny anyway because the bastard is dead, but Kara still laughs like a loon.

They tip back another round, because their tastebuds are long since burned away anyway. Apollo's hands are on the table, folded together around his mug, but hers are down below unless she needs them. Her cigars ran out long ago and she has no cards to hold; ever since Caprica, the instinct to hide has returned.

The late bastard Tigh, who's still reviled by many in the fleet and had given his life to save them all, would say that it's possible to drink yourself sober, or at least close enough to pass. This happens to them now.

"We need to start training more pilots for the _Pegasus_," Starbuck begins, just as Lee bows his head towards the cup in his hands and says:

"Ever wonder why it didn't work out between us, Kara?"

His voice is quiet, almost gentle, and this makes her angry again. "Because you're my superior officer?" she spits. "Because I was engaged to your brother? Because I had Anders and then you had Dee and we're both Grade A assholes who come close to killing each other every week? Do you need the whole list here?"

Lee sits still for a long while, until she starts wondering if he's lost the thread of the conversation. Argument. Whatever they have these days. Then he says, even quieter, "I think you were scared."

"Frak you," Kara says and walks out because, other than flying vipers, it's still the one thing she's really good at doing.

~ ~ ~

  


Dee is at the memorial corridor again. At first she'd go every time she was off-duty, then one a week, now once a month or so. There must be a thousand pictures on the walls, but she never has any trouble finding the one of her family, her and her parents and two younger brothers on Sagittaron. The photos is some years old, and on it young Anastasia Dualla is small and awkward and plump, an unruly cloud of hair around her face.

She'd lit a candle for them, back when there were candles to spare. Now she just kneels and talks, telling them everything she can think of, like she'd used to do in her letters home. She tells them when a prank's pulled in the mess, and when she falls in love, and when her friends die.

Everyone in the fleet must be used to hearing her voice by now, the faceless voice relaying orders from _Galactica_. She tells them to fire and to stop firing -- to turn on their own ships, to run away somewhere else again. Dee knows her job, and if in the beginning her voice would sometimes break in the CIC, it never does anymore.

It breaks here.

~ ~ ~

  


Felix Gaeta wishes that the map to Earth would come with a dotted line and a big red X to mark the spot.

It doesn't quite work that way, unfortunately. Instead, when not on duty in CIC, he's here in this glorified closet with a mess of starcharts spread out on the table in front of him, calculating distances and plugging in numbers on the computer. With Dr. Baltar…gone, finding the way to Earth is yet another thing Lt. Gaeta has found himself in charge of.

Late at night, when his eyes ache unbearably, he lets them lose focus and stares at the charts until he can almost see patterns, pictures, inscriptions. _Here be dragons_. That's all the star-signs are, really, just patterns someone made out of chaos late one night -- not twins or archers or colonies, not the brothers of Earth. Nothing like a map. But they're all he has to go on.

Gaeta's life used to be plotted out on a grid. His education, his previous postings were the dots, and a place on a battlestar the big red X. It was a narrow track, with no room for deviation -- no shortcuts and no detours.

A post on the _Galactica_, an old tin can heading towards decommission, was hardly glamorous, but it was his goal all the same. The first few weeks after arriving on board, he'd lie awake in his rack and wonder if he ought to feel any different. He had no more route to follow now. And for the first time, he wondered why he'd done it.

The pursuit of happiness, he supposed -- the same reason most people did things. And now, he supposed, he was happy, and could see about where he wanted to go next. Possibly even go out drinking on his next leave, meet pretty girls in bars, dance badly: all of the things he hadn't done before because he'd been too busy being on his way.

And then the world had ended, and the only place left to go was Earth. If he could find it.

Sitting on a stool in his glorified closet, Felix rests his chin in his hands and stares at the progress bar inching in near-invisible increments across his screen. He's long since stopped wondering if the gods had punished him for being happy, for having the presumption to think that he could direct the course of his own life, for forgetting their power. It's a damn stupid thing to think, when the whole human race has been destroyed.

He'd prayed in a desultory way at university, to Zeus and Athena and Apollo and the rest, just in case to cover all the bases, but he never does anymore. He hears that the Cylons believe in a God, singular, and it doesn't surprise him. Trust a machine to come up with a more efficient system of prayer.

3.5%. Frak it, this would work so much _faster_ if he were only allowed to network the computers.

He can't, of course, or the Cylons will get them. In the increasingly-long lulls between attacks, there are times when he almost stops believing in the literal existence of Cylons -- they are only their fears made manifest, the way they used to be their arrogance. And even when the threat appears, Gaeta only sees them as blips on the dradis, as lines of code.

Lines of code lack morality; they can be beautiful and deadly at the same time. Morals belong to the programmers. So he'd always thought, before the holocaust.

At times, when he's struggling to pick up the threads of Baltar's research (he doesn't have the _training_, doesn't know what he can trust), he finds himself thinking about Boomer. Back before the attack, he'd thought it funny the way the Chief and Helo both trailed after her, strong men reduced to puppies and convinced that they were being subtle about it. He hadn't joined the ranks of admirers, but he'd liked her, liked her humour and energy and the kindness that meant that she never let on that she knew, even after she'd taken up with the Chief.

And then Boomer had turned out to be a Cylon, had shot the Commander before his eyes and been killed and returned in a new incarnation, pregnant with Helo's baby. By that point, all of it had even seemed like a fairly plausible thing to have happen.

It's not until later that he really considered it, considered the fact that a girl he'd liked turned out to be a machine. Months later, he still isn't sure how he feels.

But he'd called her Sharon, the day she came to the CIC and saved them all from her fellow Cylons. Perhaps the fact that he's worked with computers for so long has made him more willing to accept that they might have feelings. He's known cranky computers and lazy computers and computers with complexes, and he's helped to cure them when they got sick. He's never known one to fall in love, though, or to give birth.

With Baltar gone, they'd assigned him an assistant, a former computer science student from one of the civilian ships. She was blonde and pretty, and they danced around each for a short while before ending up wedged together in his narrow bunk. She traced his tattoo with slim fingers, until he stopped regretting that he got it.

After a few weeks she told him, "I think we should have a baby."

He almost sat up like he'd heard the signal for an attack, like the tattoo was new and it burned. Very carefully, he said, "It would have great genes, sure. But we should probably find Earth first."

She'd braced herself on her elbow and now she sank back down, her head coming to rest in the crook of his neck. "You know we're not going to find Earth," she whispered. "It doesn't even exist."

They broke things off a short while after that, over a stupid argument about who valued whose work more. They agreed to make up a pretext and she'd gone back to the _Rising Star_ and he hasn't got a new assistant yet.

So he stays alone in his closet, and considers the Cylons, and keeps on looking for his next destination.

~ ~ ~

  


Everything is quiet on _Galactica_'s hangar deck, except for the occasional whirr and thump of tools in use. It's the nightshift, but there are always ships to be patched up.

The Chief is a permanent fixture. Sometimes he wonders if Sharon infected him somehow, made him part Cylon. If, when one of his ships is injured, he'll bleed.

She hadn't needed to sleep, either, and he does so as rarely as possible. Only when he's tired enough that he knows he won't be able to think.

But he still thinks sometimes, whenever there's some long, repetitive task that doesn't require his attention (he tries to assign those to his crew, because they've gotta learn sometime, but). There was a line in a play they had to read in school (and he bets the hotshot pilots wouldn't believe he ever _went_ to school), about how the gods had a violent love for humans, had decreed that they must suffer, suffer into truth.

There hadn't been anything in there about Cylons or nuclear holocaust, but he figures it was right enough about the suffering. He'd lied for Sharon, loving her, and it had nearly cost him his career and his life.

He doesn't regret what he felt, after all. But what it comes down to is that fixing ships is either an honest job or it's murder, and there are things he would've never done for Sharon. He figures that might be why he wasn't chosen to be the father.

But mostly he works and doesn't think about it at all, because on the hangar deck, whatever doesn't have a salvageable purpose is scrap, as simple as that.

~ ~ ~

  


Dr. Gaius Baltar is tied to a bed. His ankles, his wrists, a band across his neck. It's not how he once dreamed of being tied up.

The official story is that he's crazy, because the fleet can't know that their former Vice President and chief scientist was actually a Cylon collaborator. Anyway, it's close enough to the truth.

He still sees _her_. She climbs over him, long pale limbs broken by two strips of blue silk that can't be called a dress, and laughs into his face.

_The great genius. The great politician. The hand of God. My, my, how far you've come._

She ties a blindfold over his eyes and he can't see. She kisses him for minutes without pause and he chokes, his heart hammering with lack of oxygen and desire. She slides down onto him and he bucks up helplessly against his restraints and knows that the guards beyond the glass and the bars are watching.

He still doesn't know what she is. There is no chip in his brain. The Cylons are far behind, far beyond reach of any technology they can even imagine.

There is no way that she cannot be real. She is the great love of his life.

She whispers her catechism into his ear and tells him that he will never see their daughter, and he cannot answer her. Somehow, in the moment when the marines broke into his lab at last, she had touched his neck and taken away his ability to speak.

He is a scientist and knows how it ought to work -- knows that he must have once choked himself in a corridor with his own tie and slammed his own face against a bathroom mirror. But they'd tortured him within an inch of his life, offered him his freedom and a trip out the airlock, and Dr. Baltar hadn't said a word.

_Confess to God, not to them,_ his lover breathes, her hands gentle on his fresh and fading bruises. _And I have a confession of my own to make, Gaius. I like you better this way._

~ ~ ~

  


In the deep leather seat that seems moulded to her like a second skin, the seat in which she'd watched the world end, Laura Roslin sits and thinks about death.

Not her own. That had passed her by somehow, came close and brushed past like a moth's wing, kissed her lightly on the lips. Left her winded and changed and breathing, with an unexpected expanse before her as deep as the reaches of uncharted space.

Unless, unless something else. She'd realized, in time, that it made no difference, that she still might not see the promised land -- hadn't been destined to. That her goals hadn't changed.

And meanwhile so many had died. In accidents, in battles against the Cylons, in the occasional eruptions of violence across the fleet that were the most bitter of all. _We are so few_, she wants to shout during every trial for murder. _What right do you have to kill? What right do you have to be executed?_

And then she goes to the whiteboard that hangs before her eyes every moment of every day, and erases a number with her fingertips.

Morbid, some call it, but she knows that she has to keep track. She'd asked Dr. Cottle, a long time ago before his stroke, for a simulation of the genetic pool to assess their viability (_via_ for life). But that isn't why she keeps her count.

In another life ('in a past life,' the survivors call it), when she had been a teacher, she'd had a whiteboard like that one but bigger. She'd write equations on it, sometimes, when a colleague was ill and someone was needed to fill in, but mainly she wrote quotations, outlines, dates.

This author was born at that time. He died at that time. And in between, a dash.

This will be on the test.

When she needs to know, quickly, if she has failed -- what her score is -- she can look up at the board. It's hard to miss, since it is right in front of her.

Her aide brings her rumours from the rest of the fleet. It isn't Billy anymore -- Billy had left some time ago, disgusted with politics, went to _Cloud Nine_ and got married and took a job in the hydroponics bay. She'd always known Billy would leave her someday, and she'd even suspected the farming. Either that or that he'd become President. But he still has time.

The latest scuttlebutt comes from _Galactica_, and once she hears it she does her best to ensure that it doesn't spread any further. Over the years, she's gotten better at her interactions with the press.

The rumour goes: "The Old Man is dying."

When she hears it she smiles the smile that she reserves for him, even though he isn't in the room. "I was dying once, remember," she says. "We're all dying. Some of us faster than others." And she waves a hand at her board, on which the leading number is a 3.

33\. Time to jump.

She knows that people look at her out of the corners of their eyes, wondering if their re-elected power-hungry schoolteacher president has finally gone out of her mind. She knows that some of them still think of her as a prophet, although she stopped having visions long ago.

Right after her cancer disappeared. Funny that. She thinks the gods must know how to laugh, although Athena had been the wisest of them all, and she'd leaped down from a mountain when she saw her people perish.

She isn't crazy. She's as sharp as ever, sharper, so sharp that she cuts everyone around her until only old Bill Adama is brave enough to come close. She knows that there was talk about them once (Tom Zarek must have started it, what does he want from her now, how can he be placated this month, how much can she afford to give?), people calling them Zeus and Hera, but the truth (what truth?) is that he's never touched her since the once. Since he kissed her and gave her her death like a gift.

If it's true, Laura Roslin tells herself, then when the time comes she will return the favour.

And the truth is that sometimes, when she's putting on scrapings of lipstick from the bottom of the tube alone in her passenger liner bathroom, her lips stretched tight in a smile she doesn't feel…

Sometimes she thinks: Frak destiny. Sometimes she thinks that perhaps she'll outlive them all.

~ ~ ~

O cry created as the bow of sin  
Is drawn across our trembling violin.  
_O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain._  
O law drummed out by hearts against the still  
Long winter of our intellectual will.  
_That what has been may never be again._  
O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath  
Of convalescents on the shores of death.  
_O bless the freedom that you never chose._  
O trumpets that unguarded children blow  
About the fortress of their inner foe.  
_O wear your tribulation like a rose._  
\-- W.H. Auden, 1940


End file.
